After the latest IIS report “Svenskarna och Internet 2017” is there no doubt that mobile device usage in Sweden have increased and are steady growing. This have happened faster than we could ever anticipate. But with the growth of mobile device usage the irritation and lack of patience is also increasing amongst the users according to a research made by Google. Slow loading websites is one of the greatest challenges that companies have today. But do not despair, there are a few solutions and one of them is AMP.

As users we all have experienced the lack of patience when clicking on to a site and it didn’t delivered on the promise that was given by the display-ad, google search ad or on the Google organic search. Either the page was loading to slowly, or it wasn’t mobile friendly, so you have to pinch zoom to find the content that was promised. Well it´s not only you who think this is an issue, over 50% of the respondents in a survey that was conducted by Google answered that slow sites are the biggest issue when browsing on a mobile device.

Before we dive in to what the solution to this issue is, let’s look closer in the mobile device usage in Sweden to get a better overview. Today are 85% of Sweden’s population using internet daily on their mobile device and looking on a global scale about 60% of all Google searches is being done on a mobile device! This is a huge number!

When a user has done the search and they are entering your site, the next thing Google and the user is looking at is page loading time and is Sweden the average loading time for a site is 9,5 seconds(!) and to put this in comparison, Google is recommending to have a loading time of 2,4 seconds which is the optimal loading time and a critical rendering time below 1 seconds for mobile devices. The slow loading time is also costing money for companies, every bounce and exit is a lost revenue. For each extra second of loading time the conversions rate is being reduced up to 27%.

So here is the answer to the big question – How are you going to get your mobile-device users to stay on your site?

The solution is AMP-pages (Accelerated Mobile Page). In short AMP speeds up the loading time of the page.

An AMP-page is light (i.e. less megabyte has to be loaded) and they are fast. What makes them so fast? It´s only the minimum of resources that are being loaded, there minimum resources and how they should be loaded have been defined by Google to make them as mobile adapted as possible.

AMP page are built upon three cornerstones of HTML, JavaScript and Cache:

HTML – AMP HTML is an extension of existing HTML rules.

JavaScript – Most of JavaScripts a forbidden to use on a AMP. But if you have to use JavaScript on your site, it must be asynchronous so it don´t block the rendering path.

Cache – Both Google and the site can take advantage of cache to deliver assets as fast as possible to a user.

Does AMP affect SEO?

Yes, AMP have an big impact on SEO and how Google will show SERP (Search Engine Rank Page) results. Googles algorithms is already prioritizing how fast your mobile page are and how mobile friendly it is. By using the lasted principals that AMP have to offer your site will be higher up on the SERP and you will also get better visual results that might increase your click-through-rate from the organic results.